Friday, April 22, 2016

Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, "The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir"

First appeared in the Jerusalem Report, 2007

It took Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold twenty years to complete his
spare, powerful memoir, which originated as a message to his daughters, both of
them born in the United States after World War II. Gold, born in Poland in
1923, was the only member of his family to survive the concentration camps, and
hoped his book would help acquaint his children "with the lives of their
paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, whom they had never met
because they were murdered by the Nazis." In the course of writing, Gold
decided to direct the book toward a wider readership, but the crisp,
plainspoken style of a letter to kin serves him well throughout.

There's no recourse to rhetoric in the book, and but one
argument, albeit an overriding one. Gold's concern is that there is an
"imbalance in the way we remember the Jews of Europe. He writes: "The
Holocaust was undoubtedly the greatest tragedy in Jewish history, but it would
be a mistake to treat it as a heritage." The heritage of Jews, he asserts,
"is the way the Jews of Europe lived and what they created before the
Holocaust. Memories of the "cultural-religious heritage" he grew up
with gave him "the courage to raise a family in a world that I had
experienced as deranged by the blood and agonies of our people."

The very structure of the book puts Jewish life at its
center, and pushes the Holocaust to the side. There are 16 chapters devoted to
events before 1940, when Gold was 17, and the Nazis occupied Radom, the town he
grew up in south of Warsaw. There is a chapter about his escape from the
Germans in the final days of the war. There are two chapters about his life in
the United States -- his struggle to redefine a connection to Judaism, and his
decision to attend the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York
City and become a rabbi. There is, pointedly, not a single chapter devoted to
the concentration camps.

Gold's tale unfolds through anecdotes and imagery, with
historical context introduced where needed. Time after time Gold is stopped in
his tracks, transfixed by memory. Elocutions like: "That image . . . has
remained with me,"and, "After sixty years I can still see him,"
occur frequently. Gold grew up in an Orthodox milieu that was ceasing to be the
norm for Polish Jews. In the 1920s and 1930s, he writes, there were "about
three and a half million Jews in Poland, but less than a third of them were
religious. Most of his peers, he says, "abandoned religion for political
or practical solutions to the dilemmas of Jewish existence." But the
sounds and images that catch Gold up in this book arise for the most part from
religious life.

Gold recalls, for example, that on Shavuot in 1939 he
visited a hasidic rebbe famed for composing nigunim (prayerful wordless
melodies). When the rebbe was ready to introduce a new nigun, he "tapped
his silver snuffbox with his finger, signaling his followers to be
silent." The new nigun on that occasion was complex, and when the Hasidim
joined in to sing it, "The effect was spellbinding." When the song
ended, Gold felt as though he had "awakened from a marvelous dream."
Gold was similarly affected by an evening at the Lublin Yeshiva, when, after
hearing a lecture on the Talmud, the students "returned to their studies,
each of them chanting the [Talmudic] text aloud." As their chants emerged
through the school's open windows, the head of the yeshiva turned to Gold,
"and with satisfaction, said, 'Listen to the sound of Torah.'"

Poignant as such memories may be individually, they attest
cumulatively to the wide range of religious experiences Polish Judaism in full
flower afforded an ardent, intelligent seeker like young Gold. His memoir
should be appreciated as, among other things, the record of a spiritual quest,
though it may be difficult for a contemporary reader to recognize it as such,
since it lacks many of the features we're used to finding in the genre --
drugs, psycho-sexual transgressions, and encounters with dominating cum deranged
cult leaders. One remarkable thing about the religious world Gold recalls is
its coherence. However passionate or eccentric religious devotions might be,
they did not aim to violate or damage the communal life that hosted them.

And those devotions could be eccentric, even alarming, for
Gold, especially in their innovative form among the Musarniks. Founded in the
mid 19th-century, the Musar movement, he writes, was "dedicated to
deepening moral sensitivity in religious practice and in personal relations.
Musarniks let themselves be guided by the slogan: "A menstch darf arbeten
of zich" ("A person has to work on himself.") To overcome
laziness, for example, they might rise before dawn in winter and run for miles.
To desensitize themselves to public opinion, they would do "ridiculous
things like go to an apothecary with a bucket to purchase ten cents worth of
iodine." Without benefit of drugs, Musarniks could enter into what we
should not hesitate to call altered states. One of their techniques was to
chant "over and over again, moral phrases from the biblical or rabbinical
texts . . . until they would break down into weeping." When Gold first
heard their "heart-rending wailing," he needed to be persuaded no one
had just died. He concluded that their "radical behavior [was]
heroic," but that he, personally, lacked "the courage to do what they
did."

**

My first, indelible, impression of Rabbi Gold was that he in
no way lacked courage. I am thinking back to a Yom Kippur service at Harvard
Hillel in 1988. (He directed Harvard Hillel from 1958 until his retirement in
1990, and is now Director Emeritus.) I had planned to leave when the morning
prayers were concluded, but was rooted to the spot when Rabbi Gold began his
sermon by saying sharply: "Yitzhak Shamir tells American Jews 'Shut up'.
Here's why we shouldn't."

Gold was responding to the then-Israeli prime minister's
Rosh Hashanah message to American Jews, telling them, in effect, that if they
thought Israel was too harsh in dealing with the Intifada, then in its second
year, they should keep their opinions to themselves. Criticism of Israeli
actions undermined Israel, according to Shamir; disagreement about Israeli
policies encouraged its enemies. Arguments like these had, in my experience, by
and large sufficed to brow-beat American Jews into silence, which is why it was
striking to hear Rabbi Gold challenge them from the Yom Kippur podium.

Gold has come back to the subject matter of that sermon
several times in writings and Hillel talks. In one piece (for The Boston Review
10/11/02), he wrote that, "throughout my conscious life I have been, as I
now am, devoted to Israel." One source of Gold's Zionism was his father.
The elder Gold, though an observant Jew, guided in daily life by his study of
the Talmud -- he'd been "literally addicted to studying, Gold says in the
memoir -- had concluded "that the future of Jews in Poland was
bleak," and planned to settle his family in Palestine.

As for Gold himself, when he emerged from the camps to learn
that all other members of his family had been killed, he "accepted the
opportunity of a safe life in America despite a "preference for Israel."
He adds that while he still feels "more at home in Israel, he can no
longer be counted on to give "unquestioning support to its policies."
The building of West Bank settlements, and the 1982 incursion into Lebanon have
made him a critic.

And Gold does not espouse the view that support for Israel
must come at the expense of respect for the Diaspora. "The Diaspora,"
he wrote, "has been a creative form of independent communal life in every
part of the world." American Jews, in particular, he argued, "as the
largest Diaspora community, have to discover their own focus, independent from
Israel." They must resist the notion that they are no more than
"failed Zionists," whose role it is to "to support, submissively
and uncritically, the policies of the Israeli government."

When I ran into Rabbi Gold in Cambridge some time after his
1988 sermon, I said I thought he'd been courageous to challenge Shamir. He
looked at me quizzically, then smiled. "Courageous?" he said. "I
don't know about 'courageous'. What could they do to me?"

When I visited him in his Cambridge house recently to talk
about his memoir, I alluded to the sermon once more, noting that at the time
some people had muttered that on Yom Kippur a rabbi should stick to spiritual
things, not bring up politics. Gold chuckled, and in a much softer voice than I
heard in 1988 said, "Politics is spiritual, too. And you don't cut your cloth
accordingly to this guy's or that guy's opinion. You think what you have to say
and go ahead and say it."

I told him how surprised I'd been to find the theme of
spiritual quest clearly articulated in his memoir. At first, he wasn't sure
what I meant. I explained that I was alluding to the sort of thing we tend to
associate with, say, a journey to the East, with gurus and so on. But here it
was full-blown in his memoir, in the context of traditional Judaism.

"What you're essentially saying to me now," he
replied in a near whisper, "is that you're learning about the variety of
Jewish life."